me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun.

me, Aunt Jemima, and the nailgun.

Aziza Barnes

poems

Exploding Pinecone Press

Minneapolis, Minnesota

2013

Copyright © 2013 by Aziza Barnes

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ISBN 978-1-943735-02-0

Where you going? I don’t mind.

I’ve killed my world and I’ve killed my time

…if I live too long, I’m afraid I’ll die.

—The Kinks

I got a head with no screws in it—what can I do?

—Tupac Shakur

Contents

Aziza meets Charlie Parker in an unspecified bar on 52nd Street

in a jar

consider the hand

1997

hypnophobia

brown girl alien

my mouth

a small act

Aziza meets the 4 women: Aunt Sarah, Safronia, Sweet Thang, & Peaches at the Cotton Club afterhours

imitation of life

the picnic

moanin’: ode to Charles Mingus

a small autobiography

at a Mississippi crossroads, Robert Johnson’s daughter gets her blues

the love unlimited orchestra

Juicy (an erasure)

Aziza meets the nailgun

lullaby for my unborn daughter

Addie Parker speaks to Charlie Parker, a mother’s lost advice

a small translation

at what/hits stop

The Gettysburg Address (an erasure)

no country

Sing about Me, I’m Dying of Thirst (an erasure)

how the world will end/slavery returns to the black man

Notes

So,

me and Aunt Jemima walk into a bar, right?

And she had bit on a mason jar for her nose to fall in,

but her teeth fingers and ears all leapt in the glass,

migrating from their rancid host. By the time

she sat at the bar, ole girl barely had a face.

And my dumb-ass starts giggling right, and I go—

oh no!

I know you.

You bottled shuck-n-jive! You Uncle Tom

with-a-side-of-pancakes!You Maid-in-Gone-with-the-Wind

You Bojangles-for-breakfast!

You Amos-n-Andy-lite!

You self-hate-syrup! You slave-gone-corporate!

You black-power-fist-wit-a-hole-in-it!

You minstrelsy’s-mistress! You blackface-on-blackface-on-butter!

You Uncle-Ben’s-shawty-on-the-low! You everybody-mammy!

You—

Her skin has melded to the bar by now

and I can see thru Auntie J. The muscle

she got left shivers on her bones like a saltfish

trying to understand air. She sits now the one way

I never pictured her:

thin and white. Without eyes, she looks at me hard,

applies a set of lips to her skull, spits—

quit talking like you know black

and the box it came in.

You don’t know what it is.

To smile for all them folks.

To rot in everybody home ‘cept yours.

To watch they children.

To hear them call you ‘mama.’

To be hated by your own for trying

to find a way out. To feed your enemy

for a century and a quarter.

To have them profit off you

while you die slow.

You don’t know me.

I try to console the has-been of Blackness.

Tell her I didn’t mean it.

That I’m just a brown girl,

half-breed mutt that don’t know her place.

Don’t know how to hold her tongue

or respect the dead. I look up at her,

ready to pry out some sweet forgiving,

but my hand is nailed to the bar,

nailed to the chair,

my body pierced in rust,

I cry—

yo, Jemima, what is this?

Her teeth form a smile at the bottom of her mason jar—

Rot with me. I am your kin.

You come from me.

And when they bury you,

you’ll have my face.

Aziza meets Charlie Parker in an unspecified bar on 52nd Street

and she looked at him and he was a forest of floating caskets and that was just in the eyes and she saw his appetites shovel him at the joints and it is frightening to see a wrist mid-excavation the shock the same as seeing your mother naked to see the scars of your birth on her abdomen she can tell he wants to run away but he has at least ten small graves keeping his body at the counter and what she did next was out of pity and there was no behavior to give it a name a name is one of many small borrowings and she wanted to own something that day she took his liter of whiskey broke the bottle into a set of shark teeth and carved a front door into her neck she looked at Charlie and coughed walk inside this city is perishable but it’s warm here bird don’t you know I would die for you

in a jar

i’m just a set of teeth you know that?

no dabbed lips in compact mirror, no last dance.

i got one piercing on my left ear, it always infected.

cleaning it s’like washing a bullet hole in a window.

you thought this was a stain? ha.

you the same little stupid that thought

water in a jar knew how to be an ocean

once.

maybe twice if it knew how to bite off enuf,

if it knew enuf, knew where the border was.

i don’t know a lot of words

once. i demolished a face with a sentence:

well, i’m leaving.

and i think that’s what an ocean is,

crash me with what’s in me.

i’m a fair fight. one set of teeth on top

of its opponent, they twins, sea on sky. i see it now:

the world’s just one big mouth.

that’s why we hate the ugly things.

an infected earlobe s’like swallowing a cavity.

we don’t have enuf time left

to witness a foul meal. i front porch

with house chewed off. i woman,

muscle screwed down to sweat. i just

try to please the water out.

you know you lose 21 grams the moment you die?

s’like losing 5 teeth.

consider the hand

after Aracelis Girmay

Consider the way a tumor holds:

sweat through, as in a coal miner,

or chilled in back alleys,

outside of a club and myself,

wiping an old night off my face.

If there was a fist here, give it another name:

a coiled Christmas light, blackened. A prayer,

a spider in the pantry; harmless, unrelenting.

The way love isn’t.

The way a cancer doesn’t know.

It is the one on my lap at funerals,

folded down in a church,

letting some sour God get sick of some sour me.

It is the one that cannot reach my mother

when she cries in the car.

There is a small callous,

unwanted patches of hair,

the stark resemblance to a crab:

all the fixings of a high yella

and a high yella’s daughter.

Everything written is 10 years too old.

A coward, it crawls out of a nail bed

and makes a wrong turn, missing

a chance at the mouth.

I blame the right for every packaged silence,

for every brewing “no,” hammering in the wrist,

for every blood it dreams to expel

in a strained silhouette victorious,

for holding yours, for calling it “nothin’,”

for holding yours, for calling it “home,”

and what a funny happening.

I’ve made two brothers unmusical somehow.

The left is not the same.

It is some woman’s thing used so often

I forget it’s there.

1997

When you’re 5, your sister

will stare only at objects.

The body associates

with like-matter. For a month,

the non-breathing will resemble

a 20-pound girl with a blue face.

Her doctor is a handless blacksmith.

Whatever he administers

was engineered by faith,

is at the mercy

of what you will cling to.

From that time, you will not

remember any sound: your father’s

voice, the axe-picked march of mucus

out of his daughter’s chest,

the doctor’s shuffling steps, (which

you imagine are small coffins, clapping

the way to your sister’s room).

All of these will be hollowed out

for you. The body, for all its holes,

likes to protect.

Your sister’s lungs will be returned to her.

Recovery is a forgetful God. The radio

will become an appliance of torture.

For the next year, you will clap off-beat

to every song. The music gnawing

at the fences around your ears.

hypnophobia

Someone is choking you while you sleep.

Your English teacher. The one who

wears those awful khaki pants that show

his manhood everything. He cackles over

your bed, your skin, that hot piece of coal.

Someone must’ve cut the wire, the one

connecting your brain to your backhand.

Not even an eyelid will save you. He hears

your heart. He can’t stand the pulse of it,

the off-putting way you want to save yourself.

He rolls up his sleeve and tunnels his arm

down your throat, uproots your heart,

says to you, “eat it.”

You are an unstitched doll learning her parts

as she loses them.

I am not afraid of the night. I am afraid

of its obligation: to close your eyes

and unleash that tight fist of knowing.

I could not have been born this way.

For every fear, there is said to be

a triggering effect. Someone holding a gun

saying, “this may be my fault, but it’s still

your story.”

A fear of sleep is a fear of losing control.

In my hometown, there was a girl up the street

that knew every part of you is a mouth—

“Look at you! How open you are.

Your body can only say, ‘yes’ to me.

Look how your fight forgot you.”

I can never land a punch in my dreams.

Never rip my attacker apart nail by nail and see

how helpless that house was. I’m not a fair fight.

I don’t know a lot of words. I don’t know

how to say “I slept with every man after you

and woke up on fire.” I don’t know how to say

“Everyone in my dreams is borne of you.”

I don’t know how to say “You cannot have me.

Not now. Not again.”

“Do not sleep by yourself. There must be

some part of you that don’t trust the rest

of you. Find someone who don’t

wanna gouge out her eyes to make sense

of the dark.” This was never about finding a savior

to share the bed with. I am not lonely.

I am not the weak calling my sickness

the tyranny. What I fear is what I can’t hold.

What I would win the world for.

brown girl alien

You have no idea

how bad I want a 16-wheeler

right now. A blue raspberry Slurpee

in left hand and one-o-dem trucker hats

that says “John Deer” or some

such fiction, maybe a pair-a overalls—

that might be too much.

But the sentiment is strong,

like Bourbon-stink. Gosh,

how delicious the Midwest sounds,

like a fat watermelon in August.

I wanna drive past stacks of nothings—

tumbleweed nothings, crab grass nothings,

cactus nothings, sand nothings. Nah,

I don’t want the Midwest after all.

I want the I-90 to the Joshua Trees.

Maybe a vulture-picked carcass to stare at.

I wonder, when the aliens dig up all our sacred,

will they be as confused as I am now?

Will their questions be my questions?

What animals were these? The kind

careful enough to preserve the body

of their beloved or the kind selfish enough

to play dress up with their dead?

Or the kind sad enough to say,

“shit, what’s this road for if you’re under it?”

And I’d drive on miles of I-don’t-know-

what-naturally-grows-here-but-if-I-keep-

moving-maybe-I’ll-forget-how-I’m-gonna-

lose-you-one-day-no-wait-look-at-the-air-

(a gravity nothing)-look—

look at it go.

my mouth

a cavity of red.

a handful of yes.

a mother, but not quite.

the pit, not the core.

sex, surely. something

I got from my mama.

a mama, absolute. light

as muscle. honey as instrument.

faith’s internment. sin as verb.

a womb littered with teeth. collateral

for sound. the inside of lamplight.

a 60-watt bulb, stained. a fistful of belt,

rusting. dirty as a street corner.

dirty as blood. dirty as memory.

something you grow out of. into.

a wound laced with noise. Luther Vandross

on repeat. the sun’s attempt at skeleton.

a domesticated violence. a handcuffed ocean.

a root, mid-riot. a root, electric. a root,

viral. a root, distracted. a root, unplugged

and soaked. a closet of lust. socket of breath.

a basin clogged of promise. bolt. the spine’s

response to holding. joint gone pulse.

joint gone rogue. joint gone.

something biblical. a verb. hometown

slapped on a body. unedited psalm.

a warm inheritance of bones. tender hook.

line of hooks. slaughterhouse moonlit as church.

grandma dancing with a broom to Footsteps

in the Dark. broom as husband. broom as want.

a strangled trail of notes. desperation incarnate.

buttoned-up vinegar. a zoo of hymnals.

field of callous, beating. a road, condemned.

a road, eulogized.

a small act

for Audrey Hailes

blues bands from Mali, half of a grapefruit,

toast saved from burning, earl grey and honey,

lavender soap, a shower, cocoa butter cuz you bit

your lip, it’s okay. it’s okay.

hot water, prayer being breath alone, apricot jam,

white t-shirt instead of a towel, wooden

kitchen table, brushing your teeth,

one thing at a time, a bad Richard Pryor movie,

laughter boiling and fine out of the throat,

first laugh in a month, rice and cardamom,

whiskey sours, the sexiest drink to order,

reading Oscar Wao out loud, the first chapter

of something, buds of tea brewing,

cocoa butter cuz you bit your bottom lip,

it’s okay. it’s okay.

looking at the eye of your own storm,

ordering Indian food instead, Beth Israel,

in a waiting room with a math major from China

who can speak better Spanish than you

even though you look Boricua

and that makes you mad, your phone

taken away, please put it in the bag,

you can get it later, maybe, depending,

“don’t worry, I’m here, just outside,”

old woman in wheelchair across from you

dancing in muddy Cantonese, loss

of a translator, green smocks, it’s

okay. it’s okay.

“don’t worry, your sister’s here, just outside,”

bodega flowers’ quick decomposition,

men with faces so chocolate you gotta make

a song ‘bout em and shout it on the 6 train,

pennies, hospital bracelets with your name,

DOB, knowing who you are without instruction,

breathe, okay, try again,

Nostrand Ave, forgetting your government

and becoming brown girl on Macon Street,

wheat beer, Sankofa Aban, shea butter

for your hair, brownstones on brownstones,

looking up at all the visible stars (seven) and saying,

“I guess I’m still here,” beer, the good kind,

feeling blood on your busted lip, it’s okay.

you’re still here.

Lilith’s Brood, how one story becomes

another thing, then another, then

too much, then just blood, 9 calls

from your mother, 9 calls from your father,

it’s okay, it’s okay, I’m still here,

yes, you are, unexpected sunlight,

cocoa butter on your lip, you bit your lip.

you did it on purpose.

you kept on your bracelet.

you will take it off. hot dinner,

half-cut ginger root, Earth Wind & Fire

album covers, your breath, in Brooklyn,

just now, just this, this small act,

this staying here.